Part of Wharton’s Business foundations specialisation Introduction to Marketing on Coursera is a perfect initiation for getting to the root of customer decision-making. Key topics include branding strategies, customer-centric marketing strategy, and new market entry.

I have included my notes I took throughout the course not just for anyone to read but for my own reference to look back on in future, and to give me an opportunity now to review the course.

Firstly a big thanks to Barbara E. Kahn, Peter Fader & David Bell from University of Pennsylvania who put together this course and offered it up to anyone on Coursera

Building Strong Brands

Buyers market has product focused marketing (i.e. great products) – product orientation = persuade the customer to what what the firm has

Generic Products

Lower Cost

Profitability Drivers: Market Share

Seller market – focus on company – perused the firm to offer what the customer wants

Customer Centricity

Is a strategy that aligns company development delivery of its products and serves around the current and future needs of a select set of customers in order to maximise the long term financial value of the customer to the firm.

Customer centricity requires the company to be willing and able to change its organisational design, performance metrics and employee / distribution incentives structures to focus on this long – run value creation delivery process.

Building long term relationships – not just closing sales and moving on.

Look ahead and figure out who the valuable customers WILL BE..

Living in a customer-centric world.

Over-arching objective for customer centricity is to MAXIMISE THE SHAREHOLDER VALUE for the company

Customer heterogeneity – some customers are much more profitable than other customers.

The past is an imperfect guide to the future.

Focus on future profitability!

Success arises through enhanced and / or more efficient customer acquisition, retention, and development.

Customer-centric organisation structure.

customer relationship data can’t be commoditised

The competitive advantage “relationship expertness” with respect to focal customers

Customer centricity does not suggest that non-focal customers should be ignored. to the country, its important to have a healthy proportion of such customers to add a high degree of stability and robustness to the overall customer based (think of them as cash in an investment portfolio)

Stable predictable customers

Taking this idea further there is a paradox of customers centricity – the more the firm tightens its central focus on a select group of the customers the more it needs its non-focal customers to stabilise the overall mix.

Customer focused – Make products for the product centric people, then make the rest of the products product centric for the rest of the customers.

Who is the customer?

Agree on one of the entity is the customer matters more than others.

P&G the customer is the retailer.

Can your organisation come u with a single consensus answer to this question or can you at least reconcile the roles / relationships of the different potential customers?

What are the major barriers to account for? Develop a comprehensive list, ranked by importance / difficult of each barrier.

What resources can the utilise to overcome these barriers?

convergent thinking around customer

divergent thinking around product

Thoughts about what competitors are doing in this area?

Does it make sense for your organisation to become customer centric? IF so , what should be your immediate goals and medium-term expectations.

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Author: Stewart Barrett

Stewart Barrett is an agile, results oriented data driven digital strategist & business focused online marketer with over 10 years’ experience. Passionate about businesses that challenge and disrupt markets, who is inspired and fascinated by the ever-changing world of digital.

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Stewart is an agile, results oriented data driven digital strategist with over 15 years’ experience designing, building, and marketing web and mobile platforms.
Stewart has a passion for businesses that challenge and disrupt markets. He gets particularly excited working with big data, solving critical strategic problems and rolling out creative solutions to ensure changes are smoothly implemented. Stewart loves finding a way to make things better.

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Tomorro

Tomorro is a global promotion aggregation site where people are encouraged to dream generously and give back to the community... Read More on this Project...

SHESAID

SHESAID was Australia’s first premier female fashion site launching back in 1999. Stewart lead a team to completely redeveloped the site with a new premium branding and undertake a full marketing strategy to relaunch... Read More on this Project...